Mother by Batnadiv HaKarmi Weinberg

We sit in the kitchen my grandmother, my mother, me listening to the susurration of water boiling on the stove.

Once the bottle is sterile, a careful spoon of powdered formula— my nephew needs to be fed every hour filling the tiny pocket of his stomach. Then the crying and flailing till he spits most of it up.

He is a half-hatched chick in my arms— his lashless eyes holding mine, mouth opening and waiting, the bumps of his shoulders shadows of wings unformed when he flew untimely from the womb.

My grandmother, sunk heavy in her seat, says: “You should stay here, not go on the trip.” My mother: “No, she should go.” My grandmother: “And leave him?” He grabs at my wrist with twig fingers. My mother: “I’ll care for him.” My grandmother: “But she, she’ll care for him almost like his mother. Almost as good.”

Unsaid: And you won’t. Unsaid: And you can’t. Unsaid: There is no atonement for not being there when his mother died.

My mother starts to cry. My grandmother smiles— a knife slashing across her face satisfied she still has power; pained, because she can’t stop. Because after the first pain there is always another.

“You’re going” my mother says to me. Beneath their battling gazes the baby stirs, kicking his fragile feet into my hands. The air in the room is viscous as the lost womb. I bend to him and whisper, “Breathe.”

Batnadiv HaKarmi Weinberg is a Jerusalem-based writer and visual artist whose works have appeared in Poet Lore, Poetry International, the Ilanot Review, and Partial Answers. The recipient of the Andrea Moriah Prize for poetry, she studies poetry in the creative writing program at Bar Ilan. She is on the faculty of the Brandeis Institute of Music and Art, Brandeis University.